


sing it back to me

by violentdarlings



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-03
Updated: 2013-05-03
Packaged: 2017-12-10 06:34:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rory and the TARDIS. Tiny bit of fluffy angst. Spoilers for The Doctor's Wife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sing it back to me

Written after my first viewing of the marvellous episode The Doctor's Wife, and then promptly forgotten about. Part of my ongoing war against capitals.

Title taken from Moloko's Sing It Back - one of the sexiest, sweetest songs I've ever heard.

Disclaimer: I have never fancied the TARDIS more, but that doesn't make her, or the lovely Rory Pond, mine.

* * *

 

_**sing it back to me** _

__

he cradles her head in his hands as the Doctor talks on and on, buying them time, buying them oxygen, buying them God only knows what. he and Amy work together, playing off of one another's words and hand gestures and sheer desperation. and Rory does what he does best, tend to the sick, the ill and the injured, moving to Idris' - the TARDIS', really - side with efficiency (and yeah, fear. because two thousand years taught him well enough what death looks like).

her pulse in her throat is dancing beneath his fingers, trying in vain to get away from the shell that contains her. eyes shut, as though the sight of the TARDIS - herself? - like this is enough to make her sick or drive her made, or somewhere terribly in between.

but her eyes flicker open, a hint of flame glinting in their depths, golden coins at the bottom of a deep, dark well.

_pretty,_ she sighs. _you're pretty._

_uh, thanks,_ he replies, and she bats at his hand playfully, but with little strength. _right back at you. although,_ he adds, looking around the emerald-lit TARDIS, _not right now. you look a bit seasick._

her laughter is faint, her lips twitching into a half-hearted grin on a face waxy in the green light. _oh, by the stars,_ she murmurs, hand going to her chest, and it's all ridiculously cliché except she's dying, right now beneath his hands, she's dying. _the only water in the forest is the river._

_what was that?_ he asks, but she's already delirious, her skin aflame and her eyelids fluttering, her body lax. he can practically hear her vital organs shutting down, one by one, giving up the ghost as she blazes herself out from within. he tries to analyse it, see her as a patient, but under the soft skin he can feel the hum of the TARDIS. her breathing is the rasping whine of the TARDIS materialising, and the skull he can feel beneath her thin, barely sufficient skin is a confinement, a universe of its own forced into the cage of this woman's poor, suffering, tiny little brain.

poor thing. poor TARDIS.

_the only water in the forest is the river._

Rory's problem, he knows, is that he's too kind, too afraid to upset people. oh, around the Doctor and Amy he can be strident enough, particularly when the two of them get too close and wrapped up in each other. then he can be strong and interrupt, come between their little pas de deux and turn into a dance for three, back and forth boxstep, four hearts the rhythm.

but right now, with the TARDIS dying beneath his hands, he cannot regret the kindness that brings his hands to her hair, stroking, soothing, leaning in to listen to her gasping words.

_the only water in the forest is the river._

_there isn't any forest,_ he tries to tell her. but she will have none of it and neither will the Doctor, his exclamations going unnoticed until that sparkling gold comes out of Idris' eyes, streams out from her mouth and her nose and her fingertips.

she's gone. and she's back.

later on, curled against Amy in the hard-argued for double bed in their new bedroom, the TARDIS back where she belongs in the control room yet seeming so far away, he will recall it with cold clarity.

he swears he sees her wink. _pretty._

_the only water in the forest is the river._

River.

she belongs to time.

and so he stands back, and watches her burn.

 


End file.
